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It Ain't Just the Catholics

Started by Recusant, February 13, 2020, 06:19:19 PM

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Recusant

'Cause, you know, forgiveness is a Christian trait, OK?

"'The tongue is a fire': Southern Baptist church fractures over secrets and spiritual abuse" | USA Today

QuoteOn a Sunday morning in late 2017, Oakwood Baptist Church pastor Donald Foose stood before a congregation that had been blindsided by the sudden departure of their previous head pastor.

Foose offered no answers to their lingering questions. Instead, his voice booming through the sparse sanctuary, he preached about the destructive power of gossip.

"The tongue is a fire," Foose declared, reading from the Letter of James. He held up a piece of paper with his own name and the name of the church on it. With his other hand, he struck a match – and lit the paper ablaze.

"Look what that little fire did," he said once the sheet had burned. "It destroyed me. It destroyed the church. It destroyed the unity of the church. And I'm amazed that I didn't catch the place on fire."

Within six months that sermon would seem like an attempt to smother questions leading straight to Foose's disturbing past. The details emerged regardless.

In 2000, Foose was convicted and jailed for molesting an underage relative. He resigned from his role as principal of a Christian school, and Pennsylvania's Department of Education stripped him of his teaching license, deeming him "a danger to the health, safety and welfare of students." Under state law, Foose can't even drive a school bus, and were he convicted after 2012 he would have been required by law to register as a sex offender.

But Foose still became a pastor at Oakwood, then superintendent of the Oakwood Baptist Day School. Church leaders who were aware of his past concealed it from the congregation.

The truth – exposed in 2018 after a husband and wife at the church discovered Foose's record – fractured the tightknit, devout community of roughly 100 members. Pastors resigned, attendance fell, friendships dissolved and faith was tested. In interviews with more than a dozen current and former congregants, a portrait emerged of church leaders compounding Foose's betrayal by twisting scripture and exploiting the concept of forgiveness to stifle questions about how the situation had been handled.

Foose resigned from Oakwood in May 2018. Soon after, the beloved pastor who had left Oakwood months before, Bob Conrad, acknowledged in a five-page letter to his former church that he and other leaders had known Foose could not pass a background check. Foose claimed to have been falsely accused, Conrad wrote, and church leaders took him at his word, failing to prevent him from having access to children even as school employees complained about his overly familiar behavior with the students.

"I pray," Conrad wrote, "that you will find it in your hearts to forgive me for my lack in leadership and judgment."

Foose, 69, did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story. A police investigation would ultimately find no evidence that Foose had harmed children at Oakwood. USA TODAY confirmed that since leaving Oakwood, Foose has preached in at least two other Baptist churches, in Pennsylvania and Virginia, where the congregants were unaware of his 2000 conviction.

The revelations at Oakwood occurred as the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant denomination in the country with 15 million members, faced a crisis over sexual abuse that echoes the scandal in the Catholic Church. After a joint investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News last year documented abuse in Southern Baptist churches spanning 20 years and 700 victims, SBC leaders faulted a "culture of casual indifference to predatory sexual behavior."

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Dark Lightning

What gets my goat is the willingness of people to close their eyes to the truth, which endangers more children. I'd rat out the SOB in a heartbeat.

Recusant

I think it's just another manifestation of the good ol' boy network. I'm not referring to the South here, but to an in-group mindset which you can see operating in police forces, in the Catholic church, and elsewhere. He's "one of us" and that's what really matters, not what some other people have said about him, including in this case, a criminal court.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Kusa

Quote from: Dark Lightning on February 13, 2020, 08:22:14 PM
What gets my goat is the willingness of people to close their eyes to the truth, which endangers more children. I'd rat out the SOB in a heartbeat.

Me too.

billy rubin

my family in oklahoma are all card carrying southern baptists. the drama they tell me about is really entertaining. twice the priezt in the small town i waz born in has ztepped up to the pulpit, announced his resignation, and walked out the door. (different priezts).

one memorable day the deacon was caught screwing the choir leader up in the choir loft.


"I cannot understand the popularity of that kind of music, which is based on repetition. In a civilized society, things don't need to be said more than three times."

Tank

Quote from: billy rubin on February 14, 2020, 11:04:52 AM
my family in oklahoma are all card carrying southern baptists. the drama they tell me about is really entertaining. twice the priezt in the small town i waz born in has ztepped up to the pulpit, announced his resignation, and walked out the door. (different priezts).

one memorable day the deacon was caught screwing the choir leader up in the choir loft.

Hetero or homosexual?
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

billy rubin

you know, since i heard it from my 90 year old aunt, i'm sure it was hetero.

if it had been homosexual, she wouldn't have ever mentioned it.


"I cannot understand the popularity of that kind of music, which is based on repetition. In a civilized society, things don't need to be said more than three times."

Inertialmass

Quote from: billy rubin on February 14, 2020, 11:04:52 AM
my family in oklahoma are all card carrying southern baptists. the drama they tell...


That's funny.  On the other Forums when you are play-acting the role of active, bible-quoting, Inward Light-glowing Conservative Quaker, you braggadociate that the family back yonder in Oklahoma wuz all steadfast lifelong atheists

I guess when all's said and done, truth don't really matter on anonymous Internet Forums?  We all just be Okie sockpuppets to nihilism anyhow.   :(



Davin

Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Bluenose

Quote from: Inertialmass on February 16, 2020, 10:00:20 AM
Quote from: billy rubin on February 14, 2020, 11:04:52 AM
my family in oklahoma are all card carrying southern baptists. the drama they tell...


That's funny.  On the other Forums when you are play-acting the role of active, bible-quoting, Inward Light-glowing Conservative Quaker, you braggadociate that the family back yonder in Oklahoma wuz all steadfast lifelong atheists

I guess when all's said and done, truth don't really matter on anonymous Internet Forums?  We all just be Okie sockpuppets to nihilism anyhow.   :(

Hmm...  That post explains a lot.
+++ Divide by cucumber error: please reinstall universe and reboot.  +++

GNU Terry Pratchett


Magdalena

Quote from: Davin on February 17, 2020, 04:02:11 PM
Well that sounds like drama.
It does. I don't like it.

~You guys should take your dirty laundry and wash it over there.

It reminds me of when Nam called me an asshole and went to talk about me on another forum.

"I've had several "spiritual" or numinous experiences over the years, but never felt that they were the product of anything but the workings of my own mind in reaction to the universe." ~Recusant

Davin

Quote from: Magdalena on February 18, 2020, 12:50:11 AM
Quote from: Davin on February 17, 2020, 04:02:11 PM
Well that sounds like drama.
It does. I don't like it.

~You guys should take your dirty laundry and wash it over there.

It reminds me of when Nam called me an asshole and went to talk about me on another forum.
It's happened to me before as well. At least in this case the person is directly addressing the person in question.

I think there is a valid reason to show if a person is on the level or not if they have a bad history on other forums. In this case though, it doesn't feel right, it only feels like drama. I don't think we need that here.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Inertialmass

Would you feel better if I or others who have already had these same discussions elsewhere with "billy rubin" began actively participating right here?

Naaaah.

Know why?

Because Billy, right here, right now, is parroting the very arguments which we presented to him a few months ago!  This little fuker is plagiarizing my own rhetorical devices!!!  Reading this stenography now is a totally otherworldly, surreal experience, Billy's invented biographical details becoming inverted here at HAF only in order to service the borrowed polemical point.  Funny ain't it that Billy's Okie parents could change their worldviews five or six decades after they're departed this world right in concert with Billy's changing worldviews, no?

But hey, don't let us stop you from playing along.  Happy disbelieving!!!


Davin

Don't assume that because I don't like the dramatic way you're presenting things, means that I trust or believe billy rubin. I can't even be sure you're not a puppet of them trying to cause drama and fighting on the forum. A lone troll is tollerable, what we don't want is a forum of people fighting and being assholes to each other.

It might help if you addressed the plagiarism where it arises by making well sourced and detailed points.

You may not have seen my discussions with them, but billy rubin doesn't like the way I discuss things.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Inertialmass

Quote from: Davin on February 18, 2020, 05:21:13 PM
...You may not have seen my discussions with them, but billy rubin doesn't like the way I discuss things.

I've very much noticed Kev kev billy the oilfield sand blender tech snip at your daring insolence. 

Then I very much noticed an HA Mod snip at you, Davin, for telling it like it is.  Right then and there I decided the thrust of this Forum appears to be not honesty but decorum.  Pffffft.